Epiphenomenalism

Macmorris

Where do our thoughts come from, from 'us' or from our brain? If the common-sense, rational answer is that they come from our brain, then where do they originate? How do they get in there? If the common-sense, rational answer is that our thoughts are nothing more than the brain's response to a particular stimulus from the environment, then where does that leave 'us'. If every thought we've ever had has just been our genetically programmed brain processing information from the external and internal environment, and generating output, then where does free-will fit it? Doesn't it mean that our whole conception of ourselves as free-agents is completely mistaken, that we really are nothing more than biological machines? Isn't our intuitive sense of who we are based on a superstitious, supernatural believe in the 'human spirit' i.e. the immaterial essence of our being.

The question of who we are is really reduced to our consciousness. We are just the observers. We have no direct control over our body's or our brain's actions but we are consious of what they are doing and intending to do. We have such an intimate acquaintance with those thoughts that we falsely believe that it is 'us' that is generating them. This is a view known as epiphenomalism. What it means is that, from an evolutionary point of view, consciousness is pointless. It serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever. All of the physical activities of our body are merely reactions to a particular physical/chemical stimuli. Our mental states are the by-product, rather than the catalyst, of our physical states. Our bodies would still behave in the same way even if we weren't consious of their actions, just as a computer can perform complex calculations without being conscious. The fact that we are conscious (or maybe it's just me who's conscious!) is still a mystery, but there is no reason to believe that it has any affect on our behaviour. Our behaviour makes perfect sense from the point of view of natural selection.

Personally I believe that we are just biological machines. Even though I've been an extreme atheist and materialist since I was 14, I had always been reluctant to take materialism to its logical conclusion. Mainly because of my conservative, right-wing worldview I had always preferred to believe in the idea of free-will and personal responsibility. I hated the argument that people were nothing more than the product of their genes and their environment and that society was responsible for people's failures and successes. I believed
that people were more than the sum of their genes and their experiences and that there really was something inside of us that transended the material and that controlled our consious physical activities and that that something was 'us'. I believed that people were free to make decisions and that those decisions were the result of random conscious volition. They could choose to work hard and be a success, and they could choose to do good instead of evil. It was all just a matter of them choosing to. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised just how impossible this view is. We really are nothing more than the interaction of our genes and our environment. It's impossible to believe in free-will and still believe in the rational scientific position that the universe is entirely material. In a material universe, every action must be caused by an antecedent action. Thoughts can't just suddenly appear out of nowhere. They must come from somewhere and it's obvious that they come from the external environment.

Is it just me or is anyone else fascinated by this problem? Although on the surface it may seem just common-sense that our thoughts are generated by our brain, and that our brain is just responding to the environment, I think most people still believe intuitively that there is more to us than just our consiousness and that 'we' really do generate the neural messages that control our bodies. But is it possible to hold this latter view (i.e. the 'ghost in the machine') and still hold the rational view that we live in an entirely material universe?

solo1

Has anyone ever noticed that when you're having a conversation with someone, you don't actually think about what you're saying. It's all on autopilot. And afterwards you just sort of assume that it's what you wanted to say. I don't think I have ever come across anyone who thinks about what they're going to say in a conversation (i.e. someone that stops for a second to formulate an answer after you're done talking). But communication with others is a big part of our self-awareness - and if all that is on auto-pilot ...

In other words, I think about it too, but using smaller words.

SkepticOne

solo1 wrote:

In other words, I think about it too, but using smaller words.

I think its fine to use big words so long as it is explained what is meant by them (as Macmorris has done). That way more people can take part in the conversation. Avoiding the use of big words would be a mistate, imo. Take the word epiphenominalism. Without the use of this word it would be harder to look up the issue in books or on google to find out what has already been said on the issue.

SkepticOne

Is it just me or is anyone else fascinated by this problem? Although on the surface it may seem just common-sense that our thoughts are generated by our brain, and that our brain is just responding to the environment, I think most people still believe intuitively that there is more to us than just our consiousness and that 'we' really do generate the neural messages that control our bodies. But is it possible to hold this latter view (i.e. the 'ghost in the machine') and still hold the rational view that we live in an entirely material universe?

I think the most you can say from a physicalist point of view is that our behaviour is an emergent property of the brain. You can identify certain parts of the brain that appear to be associated with sentience but you are depending on external signs of consciousness, behaviour, to do this. It can't get to the core of what consiousness actually is. We can envisage a day when all behavior is fully explained in terms of inputs to the brain and the structure of the brain but this approach would not explain why you have sentience; only that you are likely to report that you do. The question for me is, if true, is this not simply a limitation of looking at things in physical terms only?

Macmorris

solo1 wrote:

Has anyone ever noticed that when you're having a conversation with someone, you don't actually think about what you're saying. It's all on autopilot. And afterwards you just sort of assume that it's what you wanted to say.

It's not just in conversations, I sometimes feel as though I'm on autopilot for over 70% of each waking day.

Macmorris

SkepticOne wrote:

but this approach would not explain why you have sentience; only that you are likely to report that you do.

That's the most frustrating implication of epiphenomenalism; we can never infer the existence of consciousness from observing behaviour because people are programmed by their genes to behave in a certain way and that's how we do behave, whether we're conscious or not. For all I know, I'm the only person in the world who is conscious and everyone else is just an unconscious robot.

The question for me is, if true, is this not simply a limitation of looking at things in physical terms only?

But surely if we live in a material universe then epiphenomenalism has to be true. For me, the significance of thinking about our thoughts is that it forces materialists (such as myself) to push their logic to its limit. Plenty of people consider themselves atheists, and yet they still assume that they themselves are somehow supernatural. That's a bit of a logical inconsistency.

I can't see any way around it, if you don't believe in God because you reject supernaturalism then you have to accept the epiphenomenalist view of who we are.

Dades

Much as I'm trying to keep out of this discussion (and in my depth) I have a question to aid my education...

Does epiphenomalism not really suggest that our destinies are already laid out? Are we only passengers in our own brains, then the chain reaction of stimulai is already underway that will lead us to old age, or under a bus, perhaps?

Are our fates predetermined?

cazeone

Macmorris wrote:

...In a material universe, every action must be caused by an antecedent action.

Not necessarily, in a timeless/static model of the universe there are no causes nor effects, merely relations between different time co-ordinates. Julian Barbour’s book on the subject, The End Of Time, makes for interesting reading.

Macmorris wrote:

But surely if we live in a material universe then epiphenomenalism has to be true.

Yes, as far as I can see there is no evidence to the contrary and I'm not aware of any logical flaws.

The wikipedia entry on it seems to treat it as a form of dualism, in that the subjective-sense is treated as non-physical, but I wouldn't agree with that. I think that the qualia and sense of self are physical processes instead of manifestations of such.

From a practical point of view though I think that believing in Free Will is analagous to believing in Newtonian Gravity - both are fundamentally false but at the same time are true when related to the level of complexity to which the refer. And the very act of having free-will (i.e. believing that there is such a thing) is in fact evolutionarily advantagous - a kind of catalyst for action, in the same way that fear or other emotional responses are.

cazeone

The Atheist wrote:

Does epiphenomalism not really suggest that our destinies are already laid out? Are we only passengers in our own brains, then the chain reaction of stimulai is already underway that will lead us to old age, or under a bus, perhaps?

Are our fates predetermined?

It's impossible to know one way or the other. Take the probabilistic nature of quantum physics; even though there is only a certain probability of knowing one of the properties of a particle after measuring another of it's properties, that doesn't imply that if you were to 'rewind time' and re-measure the same property you wouldn't get the same result. If such a thing was possible and you got a different result, then it might imply that the universe isn't pre-determined, though it might just imply a many-worlds interpretation instead.

SkepticOne

I think Macmorris's views are closer to physicalism than epiphenominalism since epiphonimalism allows for the reality of mental events even if they are only caused by brain events and don't affect the brain themselves.

Bazz

The saying 'you are a product of your envoirenment' is pretty valid in my opinion.

As is the duality, polar-opposition theory. There is surly duality when one perceives an object as something separate from everything surrounding it, or when one perceives that one's self or whatever is distinct from the rest of the world.

Human beings are just organisms afterall and we've evolved into a being that has been shaped by the envoirenment in which is our habitat and our bodies and minds have adapted to that.

Macmorris

The Atheist wrote:

Does epiphenomalism not really suggest that our destinies are already laid out? Are we only passengers in our own brains, then the chain reaction of stimulai is already underway that will lead us to old age, or under a bus, perhaps?

Are our fates predetermined?

I don't think it necessarily means we live in a deterministic universe, just that our responses to what happens to us are determined and our sense of free-will has no influence on those responses. The randomness that exists in the universe does not extend to our thoughts or our responses to our environment.

Macmorris

cazeone wrote:

Not necessarily, in a timeless/static model of the universe there are no causes nor effects, merely relations between different time co-ordinates.

Although I accept that's there's no logical basis to causality, isn't it more probable that we live in a universe where one thing is caused by another?

And the very act of having free-will (i.e. believing that there is such a thing) is in fact evolutionarily advantagous - a kind of catalyst for action, in the same way that fear or other emotional responses are.

I thought the great mystery of consciousness is explaining its origin in terms of natural selection. If epiphenomenalism is true and consciousness serves no useful purpose, how could the gene for consciousness have been selected for in the gene pool? I can't see how it serves any evolutionary purpose because we'd still behave the same way even if we weren't conscious.

Macmorris

SkepticOne wrote:

I think Macmorris's views are closer to physicalism than epiphenominalism since epiphonimalism allows for the reality of mental events even if they are only caused by brain events and don't affect the brain themselves.

I haven't denied that mental events exist. They do. My own consciousness is the one thing I'm certain exists. It's other people's mental states that I can't be sure about.

Epiphenomenalism doesn't really concern itself with the nature of consciousness. It has more to do with causal relationship between consiousness and the physical body, about which causes which. I still believe that it's the physical states that causes the mental states rather than the mental states influencing the physical.

solo1

just that our responses to what happens to us are determined and our sense of free-will has no influence on those responses.

None at all?

The randomness that exists in the universe does not extend to our thoughts or our responses to our environment.

Or maybe it's that the reduced part played by free will is a direct result of the randomness that exists in the universe.

SkepticOne

Macmorris wrote:

I haven't denied that mental events exist. They do. My own consciousness is the one thing I'm certain exists. It's other people's mental states that I can't be sure about.

Epiphenomenalism doesn't really concern itself with the nature of consciousness. It has more to do with causal relationship between consiousness and the physical body, about which causes which. I still believe that it's the physical states that causes the mental states rather than the mental states influencing the physical.

So do you regard consciousness and subjective mental events to be part of a different realm so to speak even if they are caused by physical events? Descartes of course held that the mind was made out of a different sort of stuff from the physical but that the arrow of causation went both ways. I'm wondering whether this is your view even though with epiphenominalism the causation only goes one way.

Macmorris

solo1 wrote:

None at all?

Absolutely none. Free-will is a complete illusion. Every thought we have ever had has been caused by something.

The whole question depends on how you define free-will. I think it's fair to say that most people would define free-will as the belief that our thoughts are 'inspired' rather than determined, that we can suddenly have a thought that came from nowhere and that yet we are somehow responsible for that thought and that it's a reflection of our personality. But even in this case our thoughts are still caused and you still have to answer the question of how we can claim to be responsible for those thoughts. The belief that we are responsible for our thoughts and yet that our thoughts are caused (i.e. that they come from somewhere) means that free-will, in the sense that most people understand the term, is a contradiction.

Macmorris

SkepticOne wrote:

So do you regard consciousness and subjective mental events to be part of a different realm so to speak even if they are caused by physical events?

It's possible that consciousness is part of a non-physical realm, but still one that is entirely dependent on matter for its existence. I would prefer to believe that consciousness will finally be explained in terms of physical properties though. Maybe it's just an undiscovered state of matter, one that exists in an environment that can't yet be recreated in the external world.

DadaKopf

So consciousness is an emergent property of brain function? (I.e Functionalism* - it's not something but a biproduct of the human physiology doing its thang).

*Not necessarily Logical Functionalism.

solo1

Free-will is a complete illusion. Every thought we have ever had has been caused by something.

Oh man, I don't like those apples. If this is true, why do we put rapists in jail?

cazeone

solo1 wrote:

Oh man, I don't like those apples. If this is true, why do we put rapists in jail?

Because jailing rapists is a requirement for a happily functioning society, and also because they're scumbags.

The problem most people have with reductionism is caused because they aren't able to separate the explanation of something at one level from it's higher level manifestations.

On a fundamental level there is no free-will, but it does exist at the level where people make every-day decisions.

SkepticOne

In order to navigate the social world people use concepts like honour, dignity, guilt and so forth. Although ultimately human behaviour may be caused in the physical sense by neural firings and so forth, these concepts mentioned above don't appear to be reducible to physical events. They appear only at the social level and can only be understood in terms of a community of entities having personhood and capable of subjective experience. Once you get rid of the idea of a person, the other concepts lose their meaning (as far as these concepts are understood in the everyday sense).

Basically, I don't think that the subjective is reducible to the objective; the subjective does not appear to be part of the objective way of looking at the world. When people want an explanation of a subjective thing they usually want a description of events and circumstances so that they can place themselves in the social context.

Personally I think mistakes are made when you adopt a metaphysical position and then expect everything to be explainable through this position. It is better to regard these positions as ways of looking at the world. Each way will alow you to see a different aspect of the thing being studied but no way gives you the full picture.

I think the issue here is similar to those discussed on the social constructivism thread. How are different ways of looking at the world reconciled.

SkepticOne

Macmorris wrote:

But surely if we live in a material universe then epiphenomenalism has to be true. For me, the significance of thinking about our thoughts is that it forces materialists (such as myself) to push their logic to its limit. Plenty of people consider themselves atheists, and yet they still assume that they themselves are somehow supernatural. That's a bit of a logical inconsistency.

From a physicalist stance, I would say there's no epiphenomenalism. Everything is physical. There is no other type of phenomenon which has a causal relationship of any sort with the physical.

If (this is a big if) consciousness can't in principle be explained in terms of the physical then it doesn't exist. Your belief that you are conscious is false. There is no 'you' that has subjective conscious experience.

The idea of epiphenominalism is that there's another kind of thing that exists in a causal relationship with the physical brain. I don't think there's a need for the concept if everything is physical. It is a form of dualism, but the causal relationship is one-way as opposed to cartesian dualism where it is two-way.

solo1

So, given the rapist problem, even if epiphenominalism is true, then we all have to act as though it wasn't. And if we're all acting in a manner to suggest that it's not true, then it might as well not be true anyway. What difference would it make?

Playboy

I think this has already been argued through the dialouges of Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Phenomenology and existentialism if I am not mistaken. Merleau-Ponty might be of significant interest to you.

DadaKopf

Playboy wrote:

I think this has already been argued through the dialouges of Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Phenomenology and existentialism if I am not mistaken. Merleau-Ponty might be of significant interest to you.

Could you explain why?

Playboy

because Merleau-Ponty examines the relationship between the world and our body, our body and our mind, and our mind and the world. His phenomenolgy of the 'lived body' and his arguements against rationalism and empiricism would be very relevant here. I'll type more soon when i get a chance